Wonkicorn

Governor Tim Walz, I am proud of you for raising such a clearly loving and passionate son. He has done proud by you, but I am sorry that his disability has been used as a weapon against others, especially by those that aren't as interested in charting an equitable future for him and all his disabled colleagues, myself included, around the country.

Vice President Kamala Harris, your campaign and those in the party you now, by default, lead, have put a young man with at least one disability central to your attacks on our mutual enemies, and yet the policies in your speech last week do not reflect disability justice.

For starters, the only explicit policy you mentioned that touches on the needs of disabled people are "protecting Social Security and Medicare". We don't need it protected. We need it expanded. We need to be making explicit that equity for disabled people means lifting the tax cap on Social Security completely and instituting a progressive Social Security tax. That expansion of income must then be used to ensure a Living Wage For Social Security rather than keeping us in abject poverty. Also, ending policies that result in well over four in five applications for SSDI to need to go through a lengthy and draining appeal process.

It also means backing Improved Medicare For All. If you aren't willing to extend that far, then at the very least, it is time to introduce a public option to ensure that we are able to expand benefits through a larger insurance pool including more benefits for disabled folks, control prescription and other medical prices for more people, and bring us another step closer to universal coverage.

Next, it should go without saying that any policy that needlessly increases the likelihood of creating disabilities for people is ableist from the start. That means a more hawkish war footing is counter to disability justice. We already have the most lethal fighting force in the world many times over. If the military were a tenth of its size, it would still be the most lethal even then while also greatly expanding available funding for programs that help every American, disabled folks included.

And in the specific, you must impose an arms embargo on Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza. I'd go a step further and demand that you also impose a funding embargo as funding a genocide is hardly any better than enabling one with weaponry. We have all seen the reports and the tragic media that show the Palestinians disabled by Israeli forces using American weapons. And as a Jew as well as a disabled American, I say not in my name.

And that's just to speak to top level of items in your speech. There needs to be an entire disability justice analysis of the platform you're still writing and a disability justice plank as part of that platform.

I hope you will listen. I am forced to vote for you right now as the alternative would literally either kill me or force me to flee the country. But I currently have none of the joy that your campaign seeks to create. I volunteer my labor often (because I can't be hired by any campaign lest I put the very federal and state benefits that keep me alive in danger), and I would be willing to discuss with your team further so that hopefully we can seek a better path forward together.

What all the pageantry and the celebrities and the big names are supposed to distract you from is that our primary job as voters during election season is accountability. Indeed, the mood being set was one of bringing “joy” to this election so as not to highlight the deficiencies in real answers. Or for where real answers were provided that didn’t stack up.

Vice President Kamala Harris, in her historic acceptance as the first Black woman and first person of Asian descent nominated for the presidency from a major political US party, spoke to her commitment “for the people”. The rest of her speech with its scant details makes one continue to question though, “Which people?” and the answers so far do not all point in the right directions.

Most glaringly perhaps, at least to be stated boldly out loud, was a promise to have the “strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”. Which people are asking for this? Indeed, how does one make a military that is exponentially larger than all the other militaries in the world stronger and even more lethal? Who benefits from this statement?

The obvious answer is the military industrial complex. But let’s name names which is important. The top 10 defense contractors as of last year included: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Pfizer, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Humana, HII, L3Harris, and BAE Systems.

And while those certainly represent jobs which put food on the table for many thousands of families, it is incumbent upon us to ask if the capacity for destruction, direct or indirect, that these companies create is not better spent, those jobs better assigned to production that benefits the people in a broader sense, for a better world for all.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” - President and former 4-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower (R) 

Indeed, a recent study has proposed that we could have all our human and civil rights met with but 30% of our current production power if that production were directed towards the needs of the people. If we weren’t stealing from the poor for the benefit of the rich and powerful, we could make marvels.

While I do not deny the need in this current world as it stands that there is a need for a standing military, even that being an admission that some of my fellow leftists would consider grotesque but that I consider sadly realistic, we need a strong military that is used incredibly selectively, in coalition with other nations, and only where the human and civil rights of the people of the world are endangered. A military that spends a TENTH of what we do at present would better serve us all. A military that pays its servicepeople a living wage and that ensures that after they serve they enter a country that has Medicare for All to cover their medical needs and a VA with proper funding that serves the additional supports that their service in the military must address. A military that can’t potentially be turned against its own people should an authoritarian ever actually ascend once more to the Oval Office with a plan like Project 2025 that could truly initiate a full fascist government rather than the proto-fascist one we have in place now.

All of this, of course, also turns our attention to the great injustice of the genocide in Gaza. I am careful to lead with calling it a genocide, because that word, genocide, was carefully editted out, one might even use the word censored nearly appropriately here given the context of this spectacle being part of our governmental process, for better of for worse,of any and all speeches given inside the convention. Even as protesters diligently spoke of the genocide outside the walls of the United Center, it was demurely called simply a “war” within them.

Wars are acceptable. We can fund wars. We can supply weapons from those companies mentioned above and hundreds more to a war. Profiteering off of war is quite nearly as old as humanity itself. It’s how kings and queens and billionaires are made.

But we have laws against supporting genocide, and as long as that word isn’t uttered in the halls of power, a gentleman’s, and now gentlewoman’s, understanding can be made that all is normal. All is good.

That can’t be further from the truth. In the Talmud, we are taught as Jews that to save a single life is to save the entire world. At least 40,000 worlds have already been snuffed out by this genocide. The killing is not indiscriminate as the Israeli army has the most sophisticated American technology allowing them precise control over who lives and who dies. Hospitals, schools, refugee camps obliterated with the press of a button. Palestinians used as human shields. Children, babies even, not given even a chance for life, a chance for peace.

It must stop. An arms embargo is the very least we must do. A funding embargo should also be put in place. Until Israel ends its genocide and its aggressions into other war footing, we cannot continue to enable them. Period.

Harris spoke of the right for Israel to defend itself and went so far as to promise to arm them to do so in open defiance of the calls for an arms embargo. Let’s set aside if a colonialist project can ever be said to be defending rather than, by its very nature, continuing an offensive that started with Theodore Herzl inventing Zionism in the first place in 1897. But what is defense truly? We call our war machine the “Department of Defense”, but when was the United States last on the defensive in a conflict not of our own making?

My example of defense comes from the stories of my grandmother who was a freedom fighter in Budapest in the Shoah. She did not fight with guns. She helped run an underground cell of Jews, moving from building to building, protecting each other and keeping each other alive. She spoke of using the skills she learned in her village in Ukraine from her family, cooking, sewing, healing, caring for one another, holding each other as bombs exploded overhead and guns fired in the streets outside. She won against the Nazis because they survived.

Where is this kind of defense for the Israeli people? Indeed, most of the families of the hostages realized long ago that their loved ones were being used by Bibi to hold onto power. They are not being defended with care and compassion. They are pawns for power, and they’ve spoken out against it. Former Israeli Defense Forces members that retired their military careers in protest have confirmed this from their own experiences while still in the IDF and from sources they have still inside. What we have enabled as the US through our war machine is not defense but a human rights disaster.

This alone is enough to call Harris to account in her bid for the presidency. Not only on moral grounds, but on the grounds that this is going to be an incredibly close race, scarily so given what the other party is offering, and standing on the wrong side of these issues of enabling genocide and fueling the military industrial complex will absolutely keep people from coming out to vote. Votes that Harris needs desperately.

Votes that could desperately use her message of what she calls an “Opportunity Economy” that is being lost under the sounds of bombs. There is little doubt that despite propaganda by the rich suggesting falsely that the economy does worse under Democrats, the people could benefit from many of the proposals that Harris suggests. Depending, of course, on how it is done.

Expanding Medicare negotiations on drug prices beyond the 10 already done would be excellent, and that work shouldn’t stop until it covers every drug and medical device. That’s work that would be necessary even under Medicare for All, though we’d have even far more leverage if M4A was in place than we already have with just Medicare, so it is small-p progressive work to be certain.

Passing a federal law enshrining Roe v. Wade is essential to personal liberties. Full stop.

Going after grocery companies gouging prices is good. We’ve all seen the charts showing the virtual monopolies that have developed in most sectors, food chains included. Breaking down price gouging and possibly even breaking up those monopolies would do some real good there.

Passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act (Rest in Power, legend) and the Freedom to Vote Act would prevent real abuses by white supremacists that especially Black and Brown voters are facing right now.

All that said though, even some of her rosier sounding domestic projects require accountability. Not just needing more details which the campaign still has not released in any way, especially by punting on the national platform by just passing what was planned under a Biden presidency. We must truly examine how we transform our broken-on-purpose system to a government whose first goal truly is one of enabling and ensuring our human and civil rights. A government founded on compassion and care.

Let’s start, perhaps predictably for me, with housing.

The solutions that got us into this housing crisis cannot get us out of it. When every major city has a glut of vacant housing, enough to house the entire unhoused population many times over, the call to build starts to sound like exactly what it is. A solution to benefit the real estate industry, not the people in desperate need of alternatives.

We don’t have a housing supply problem. We have a landlord greed problem.

The primary public policy need for building is to ensure affordable accessible housing which accounts for less than one percent of current housing. There are a few, especially rural communities, that also need actual units for the populations they serve, need for sustainability, or simply to accommodate people that wish to live there and be part of that community, but that have been stymied by NIMBYism and disinvestment, just another form of that landlord greed problem.

But fundamentally, putting our human right to housing in the hands of the landed gentry (the continued use of the title of land-lord is not an aberration) and tying it to financialization, all a modern form of the feudalism that white men brought with them to these shores, have completely distorted housing in America and in many places abroad as well. A standard that has infected the nonprofit “affordable housing” sector as much as any other, indeed creating some of the most prolific slumlords in practice. An alternative is needed, and it must be pursued aggressively.

That starts with supporting Rep. Delia Ramirez’s bill to repeal the Faircloth Amendment. Since 1998, the federal government has been prohibited from direct investment of funding to building additional public housing and placed limits on what individual local housing authorities could create. Of course with no federal funding coming for nearly three decades, local housing authorities are far from pushing those limits. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Public housing has been divested, privatized, and largely neglected. This was by design, of course, so that private real estate could maximize profits, and now we stand at a time where more than half of renters are paying more than 30% of their income in rent and rent expenses, also known as rent-burdened.

Moreover, finding the next evolution of what public housing can look like, has been stymied as well. That evolution, called social housing for its emphasis on community control, can be found in most other nations, the gold standard being in Vienna, Austria. This takes public funding of housing and expands upon it to make it permanently affordable, community-owned and tenant-governed. That means largely out of the control of politicians and bureaucrats, and, most especially, fully out of the control of landlords, vesting that control in the communities and especially the residents of the housing itself. And as it is publicly funded and community focused, it also is designed to meet our chief public policy goals of meeting accessibility needs and green infrastructure needs.

American experiments towards this end are underway already in Seattle and Hawaii with Chicago already having starting funding in place and getting ready to get started soon as well. Montgomery County, MD has something adjacent to social housing too. Seattle and Chicago are hoping to be inspired by the Vienna model while Hawaii is looking to the Hong Kong model. California and other states and local governments continue to study social housing too, and they hope to move forward soon.

But until the coffers at the federal level open up, this will all be difficult at best to pursue. Harris should be talking about these alternatives to the privatization model that got us in this mess, not creating more tax incentives to build millions more of the same.

The venerable Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee in the US House that oversees housing matters, even remarked that she is now “basically opposed to tax incentives because I think that all it does is give rich people, the builders and the developers, more money than they should have when they claim that they’re building affordable housing.” I agree fully, and I would go further to say that those tax incentives and “public/private partnerships” that evolved as a result of federal policy in the wake of Faircloth have created a scenario that encourages slumlords as landlords are more dependent on government money than tenant rents for their revenues (profits by a non-profit name) that enrich executives, salaries and incentives sometimes reaching upward of millions of dollars, and given that the government is not a tenant nor enforces its own laws properly, there is no reason for landlords to keep their properties in habitable conditions.

Which brings us, of course, to immigration, and especially the influx of migrants from countries like Venezuela that US foreign policy has created.

We talk a whole lot about “border security” but not nearly enough about the roles of the CIA and foreign policy in general that created the influx of people to our borders. To Harris’s credit, she seemingly takes a position that immigration on the whole is good. Under certain conditions. If you do it exactly the way she proscribes.

To that end, Harris proposes passing the “bipartisan border security bill”, but this bill would increase funding to ICE and concentration camps on US soil. Not ok.

She proposes reforming the immigration system and creating an “earned” pathway to citizenship, but she provides no details nor justification for why citizenship must be earned for immigrants now when our country’s original sins of colonialism and slavery certainly didn’t require earning that citizenship for white people or the Black slaves they brought to serve them. If, as Harris implies, America is better off with immigration and certainly the studies confirm that we are, then what more must be earned than a desire to be here and to add to the vitality of our communities?

Indeed, most immigrants even pay taxes into our national, state, and local coffers without many of the benefits that come with citizenship, so what more would we ask of them on that basis alone?

Meanwhile, holding Harris to account on her tax proposals in general is key. She proposes a sweeping and vague tax cut on the poorly defined and some would say divisive group she calls the “middle class” that would touch 100 million people. To damn her with faint praise again, it is indeed better than Trump’s additional tax cuts for the wealthy which we know never works, but without details, that’s the best that can be said of the proposal.

And what about the poor? A part of the working class that has been growing by the day. She has mentioned in other speeches made recently bringing back and expanding the child tax credit which has been one of the most expansive poverty measures in recent years and done some real good. But it is far from enough, especially for all the families out there that have made the decision not to bring a child into the world under poverty conditions.

And while we are reducing the price of groceries, let’s also talk about expanding SNAP benefits too to put more food on the table for those in need. SNAP is consistently one of the best poverty measures, helps create more demand for farmers’ products, and has one of the highest velocities of money for any government program as it’s putting the money in the hands of the people directly and circulating through every level of the economy. Putting more money in the hands of more people by raising federal funding to the states for SNAP to both expand benefits for current users and raising the caps on the current means testing to include more people and allow beneficiaries to earn more without losing access to food would help a tremendous number of people.

Harris speaks of protecting Social Security and Medicare, but protecting is not the same as expanding to ensure that it meets the real needs of lifting people out of poverty conditions. We need not just a Living Wage for workers, but we also need a Living Wage for Social Security. This would be a feasible part of the discussion if Harris were willing to commit to ending the cap on Social Security taxes and even proposing a progressive taxation to reduce the burden on the working class and greatly expand what the wealthiest earners contribute to the program.

And, obviously, passing and enacting the Improved Medicare for All bill as she once promised to do as a senator before becoming a presidential candidate.

Indeed, that’s not all to talk about where taxes are concerned as it has become increasingly obvious that there is a great need to not just capture the wealth of the most wealthy to compensate for our broken systems that create billionaires through exploitation or inheritance. Where is talk of not just reducing the tax burden on the working class but increasing the tax burden on those that can handle it with ease and that use that wealth to unduly influence power?

We need a wealth tax. I’d like to see a 100% wealth tax on estates worth more than $1 billion with a progressive system on excessive wealth below that, but I’d settle for something closer to Spain’s 1.7-3.5% to start with. Indeed, Massachusetts has already brought in $1,8 billion just this year alone with their 4% surtax on income over a million dollars.

While we rework the tax code, Harris seeks to send capital to small business owners and entrepreneurs and founders. Certainly, promoting small businesses should be a major priority. Community businesses that serve their communities in various ways deserve funding, and innovation comes from small business far more often than from large ones who seek more to protect their turf and suck up competition to maintain their profits for investors.

But that very difference highlights the vast problems in our current tax code that provides endless loopholes and subsidies and benefits for some of the largest and most profitable industries on the planet, often involving corporations that are also the most exploitative of our natural resources and labor. If we’re going to actually refocus on small businesses, let’s go all in.

Start by cutting off the fossil fuel industries completely. Then keep going from there until we’re sending out money to small businesses alone or as nearly so as national priorities allow. And as these industries will no doubt try to raise prices, put more dollars into working class family pockets, tax those corporations more, and keep them honest especially through antitrust actions and going after retaliatory price hikes with legal resources and using the bully pulpit to call them out for trying to keep the profits flowing to investors and executive pockets rather than prioritizing their customers. All while starting to fund the small businesses with even a fraction of that money saved to create the future competitors that will challenge the monopoly or cartel power they have.

While we’re at it, we can end the preferential treatment that investment money has currently as well as other abuses of the system that the rich and powerful have carved out for themselves in investment circles. We can strengthen the inheritance tax once again to prevent massive fortunes from giving some people opportunities at the expense of others and extending the wealth disparities down the generations.

And we can talk about reparations. Long, long overdue reparations for slavery. If we really want to talk about accountability, that must be on the table as well as land back to Indigenous people. We must be accountable as a nation for our original sins, and that leadership should be coming from the White House. How is our potentially second Black president not talking about these incredibly important issues as she touts her civil rights cred on stage?

Now let me be accountable to you, the reader, for just a moment about myself. I am not a member of the Democratic Party now, nor have I been for a very long time. I have no obligation to vote for Democrats, but as a leftist, our current voting system forces me to do so. But that is one of many reasons that I do work as a human rights activist that specializes as an expert in housing and disability policy. To change the system. To keep it accountable as much as I can and to put pressure on it in the hopes that eventually there will be a party that will represent me and my ideals.

In truth, voting is the start of democracy. Far from the totality of it. You must engage further than just showing up to vote. Organizing for justice is essential.

When the change from Biden to Harris happened, I, like many out there, were excited. Change was needed, and we all saw it. We organized for it and finally won. I was ready to throw down in the hopes that the message was heard, and that Harris would offer a new path, especially on the genocide. She proved last week that that wasn’t the case, even doubling down on the war footing. Plus, her policy platform remains largely an elusive, amorphous, largely undefined moving target.

I will vote for Harris because the alternative is truly horrific on all counts. We’ve seen their policy. In great detail. I know I would die or have to flee the country if Trump wins. Harris at least keeps me in the fight here in the US. But my ability to actively support her, to do work of my own accord, to spend spoons for her has been nullified completely, just as it was for Biden. I have to vote for her, but I won’t work on behalf of genocide.

There will be others that can’t even bring themselves to vote for her without a tremendous push in the direction I outline above. The joy is gone. For especially our Palestinian brothers, sisters, and non-binary family, despair has set in, and all the promises taste like the ash that covers Gaza. I can’t blame them.

A better world is possible if we reach for it. We can have a government grounded in compassion and care if we demand it. Ensuring that every single person in this country has their human and civil rights is absolutely feasible if we hold our elected officials accountable for it.

Made an account while getting ready for Facebook to implode. Only 17 years behind though. What'd I miss? Anything important going on? Anyone need an old housing justice policy expert? *taps mic*

In news, the National Low Income Housing Coalition just released a case study report on Just Cause for Eviction which I'm looking forward to reading in the next few days. With Chicago's Just Cause for Eviction ordinance slightly stalled because of Budget Season starting, the timing is good to get a look at how things have gone in other fights around the country. We're now up to 10 states, 19 municipalities, plus Washington DC all having passed some version of Just Cause between 1974 and now with federal housing requiring Just Cause as well. That's well over 10 million households where landlords can't just evict you on a whim, and the data has been clear for a long time that these laws have a significant effect on keeping people housed and keeping communities together (the Princeton study did a really great job on documenting this in four different California cities).